Chapter 10
LEADING BY DESIGN
The Primary Needs
A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.
—Richard Thaler
For all the free will we humans think we have, we're surprisingly susceptible to influence. Do you want to get people to eat smaller amounts of food? Serve it on smaller plates. Do you want people to sign up to be organ donors? Make the default option a yes rather than a no.
These two illustrations come out of the field of behavioral economics, examples of what's known as choice architecture. In both cases, someone thought about a situation and designed a specific environment to unconsciously influence (or, to use Nobel Prize–winning economist Richard Thaler's word, nudge) others toward a specific result).
If you want to create a highly motivated team, you can't leave it to chance. You have to operate as a motivational choice architect. This takes tact, finesse, and an understanding of the subtleties and nuances of human behavior.
In this (and the following) chapter, you'll gain tools and specifics into the process of intentional motivational design. You'll learn about fundamental human needs, as well as how they set the tone for high performance and effective collaboration. You'll also explore potential tools to help you meet those needs. Armed with these tools and some deliberate practice, you'll be ready to create a culture in which those you lead will make the switch from doing something because they have to do it to doing something because they want to do it.
MOTIVATIONAL DESIGN
Traditional architects design structures. In their work, they use the elements of point, line, shape, form, space, color, and texture. Motivational architects work in an entirely different medium. Their goal is not the design of physical structures; they design environments for the people that they lead to work in.
If the environment is designed well, people can thrive and perform at their best. If the design is poor, people wither and results suffer. Instead of using lines, colors, and textures, leadership architects work with the foundation of behavior: human needs.
HUMAN NEEDS
Needs are fundamental to human existence. The first understood needs were biological: food, water, clothing, shelter. The reason for this is obvious: they are all visible, external, and tangible. If you don't meet these needs, you'll die.
However, there are other needs—social and psychological—that are required to function and develop as a member of society. Take the need for attachment, for example. An infant needs to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for the child's successful social and emotional development. Children who don't get their need for attachment met are more likely to develop an attachment disorder, leaving them feeling isolated and unsafe. Later in life, they're generally less trusting of others, possess lower self-esteem, and have difficulty forging close relationships.
Our human needs are so important, they must be continually met on an ongoing basis. In addition, although each need is essential to our being, none happen in abstract isolation from the others. They coexist in a dynamic, interconnected system.
In the past century, many models and theories on human needs have been created. Some of the best known are Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Erickson's eight stages of development, and Piaget's theory of cognitive development. However, no matter the framework, all agree on one thing: all humans have universal needs. You'll find needs wherever you find people.
Human needs are so fundamental that they've remained unchanged for all of human history. For example, people have always had a need for subsistence. However, how we've gone about meeting that need has changed. Hunter-gatherers on the savannah didn't meet their subsistence needs at the McDonald's drive-thru. In fact, it's the expression of how these needs are satisfied that differentiates one culture from the next.
As a leadership architect, your goal is to design a high-performance culture. You'll use a structured yet flexible process so you can respond to the varying needs of different people. This need-satisfying process is simple and cyclical: once you finish the last step, you arrive back at the start and begin again. The process is as follows (see Figure 10.1):
- Prioritize which human need to address.
- Choose which satisfier can best meet that need.
- Decide how that satisfier will be expressed.
- Observe the impact of that satisfier on the people and the environment.
- Adjust and reprioritize (repeat step 1).
Before you get started, you'll want a detailed understanding of the materials you'll be designing with. There are four human needs that are central to effective collaboration:
- Safety
- Energy
- Purpose
- Ownership
Figure 10.1 The Need-Satisfying Process
The first two, safety and energy, are primary employee needs and the subject of this chapter. Similar to air and water, you won't last long if these needs remain unmet. If you're going to motivate people, you need to start here.
Once the primary needs are met, you can turn your attention to the performance needs—purpose and ownership. Built on a foundation of the primary needs, these higher-level needs are what ultimately improve performance. They will be the subject of Chapter 11.
Primary Need 1: Safety
At our core, everyone needs safety. If we're unsafe, we feel at risk, living in a danger zone. Trying to work (let alone achieve high performance) without feeling safe is nearly impossible.
Safety is a multilevel concept. The most basic level is that of physical safety. People don't want to come to work and get hurt or sick. Potential physical safety satisfiers include answering yes to the following questions:
- Is the work environment well-lit and well-ventilated?
- Are there no obstructions that could cause an injury?
- Is the workplace located in a geographically safe location?
- Is the physical building secure?
- Is the furniture ergonomic?
Ensuring these needs are met is the reason that OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) was founded.
After physical safety comes fiscal safety. People need a return for their labor. Satisfiers here include the following:
- Is there fair compensation?
- What kinds of benefits are offered?
- What kind of job security comes with the position?
In today's world, meeting baseline physical and fiscal safety needs is expected. And although these needs are necessary and important, they're not sufficient by themselves. As Alfred Hitchcock heard from Paul Newman (see Chapter 9), salary alone was not an adequate motivator.
The next level area of safety is much more complex, much less understood, and most important. It's also the area where you as a leader have the most direct influence. This is psychological safety.
Psychological safety can be defined as “being able to show and employ one self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.”1 It's the ability, as one CEO I worked with put it, “to bring your whole self to work.” You don't have to check a part of yourself at the door when you enter the building in the morning.
Psychological safety is a visceral experience people have (or don't have) working in teams. When people feel psychologically safe, they believe that they can take risks and try new ideas. They feel supported and respected by the team. They feel their team has their back.
When team members feel psychologically safe, they are more likely to do the following:
- Admit, look at, and learn from mistakes.
- Offer feedback, both positive and negative.
- Generate new ideas that can be of value.
- Share best practices.
- Be more supportive and encouraging of others.
When psychological safety is not present, the following reactions can happen:
- Team members are excluded from information sharing and/or decision-making.
- Ideas that are offered up are “assassinated.”
- People don't share their ideas and/or perspective for fear of criticism.
- People who disagree withdraw from discussion and opt to gossip and avoid directness.
Google is not known as a company that relies on intuition, emotion, or psychology. On the contrary, Google is world-famous for harnessing the power of data to drive decision-making. This ability is reflected in their mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
In 2011, Google decided to invest their data-hunting power to answer this important question: “How can you build the best team?”
The findings of their research (named Project Aristotle) were recently shared by author Charles Duhigg. Project Aristotle's researchers started by looking at 50 years of academic studies on teamwork. What was the hidden factor that made the best teams the best?
As they pored over the studies, they kept looking for patterns. They created numerous hypotheses. Was the greatness due to similar interests? How much they socialized outside of the office? Similar educational backgrounds? Personality types? The gender balance of the team? As they analyzed and reanalyzed the data, they were flummoxed: they couldn't find any patterns.
Finally, they focused their attention on group norms: the unwritten rules of how people behave. As they dove deeper into the group norms of teams, they discovered two specific norms that stood out among great teams:
- Team members had approximately the same amount of air time, that is, they spoke in roughly the same proportion.
- Team members were skilled at picking up on how others felt based on tone of voice, body language, and other nonverbal cues. They were sensitive to each other's moods.
These two norms are key tenets of psychological safety. The best teams create a culture in which people feel comfortable speaking up and taking risks.
So how can a leader create a culture that promotes these norms? You can satisfy the need for psychological safety through the behaviors you model. One Google leader, Matt Sakaguchi, attended a presentation on the findings of Project Aristotle. The project's findings intrigued him. He had just taken over leading a new team of engineers, and a survey had shown that many of his team members were feeling unfulfilled in their jobs. Specifically, they didn't have a clear vision of how their work contributed to the larger whole.
Sakaguchi gathered his team at an off-site location and started by asking everyone to share something personal about themselves. He decided to go first:
I think one of the things most people don't know about me is that I have Stage 4 cancer.2
Not an easy thing to share. Sakaguchi's honesty and vulnerability broke the ice for the team. Things got very real, very quickly. As their conversation unfolded, they shifted to talk about the things at work that bothered them. Suddenly, their workplace annoyances and conflicts seemed smaller and more manageable in the grand scheme of things.
One Google engineer, Sean Laurent, shared his insight into this need to feel safe:
The thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can't be open and honest at work, then I'm not really living, am I?3
Modeling openness—especially when tensions are high—is the most important thing you can do to promote psychological safety on your team. As a leader, when you're vulnerable, you give others permission to be vulnerable too. The resulting culture of candor eliminates the need to keep up the appearance of the corporate façade of everything and everyone being okay. Instead, you can cut to the chase and deal with what's really going on.
It seems particularly relevant to also include that psychological safety means that people are free from bullying and sexual harassment. These behaviors are criminal. People who are bullied and harassed do not feel safe. As a leader, if you see or hear instances of this happening, you need to respond, investigate, call it out, and address it appropriately.
Primary Need 2: Energy
Energy is the fuel of high performance. For people to achieve great results over a sustained period, they need to be enthusiastic about the effort they put into their work. Although this may seem intuitively obvious, it's not the norm. Consider this all-too-common story of Sage, a manager at a manufacturing company that I worked with.
I'm convinced that my company tried to turn me into a zombie. When I started, I was excited, curious, creative. I was ready to help the company change and grow. That's what I talked about in my job interview. That's why I thought I was hired. So when I started, I spoke up in meetings, shared my ideas, looked to connect with people outside my function, and make things happen.
At my first performance review, my boss told me, “You need to dial it back a little.” If I read between the lines, what he was really saying was that he was upset that I was outshining him.
That review was a wake-up call. I started looking around at how everybody else worked. I started noticing who gets ahead here. What's rewarded is effort, not results. It's the people who get in early and stay late and sit quietly in their cubicle all day long. It's the people who respond to their boss's emails within five minutes on the weekends or late at night. The ones who spit back exactly what their boss tells them.
After that review, I was completely demoralized. I figured if that's the way the game is played, then I can play it that way too.
I've tried it for a few weeks now. I hate it. I feel so fake…and so drained. This isn't what I signed up for. I don't know what I'm going to do.
The cultural and behavioral norms Sage describes sound like they were taken straight from the pages of the Dilbert cartoon series. There's a reason Dilbert is wildly popular: it hits a little too close to home. Most people have firsthand experience with the zombie workplace—it's the standard at most companies.
There's a worldwide employee energy crisis. The zombies have become the silent majority. Global studies have found that the percentage of employees who are “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace” is only 15%.4
The energy crisis doesn't just impact morale. It affects every aspect of your organization. Low energy and commitment influence turnover, productivity, revenue, quality, safety, absenteeism, shrinkage, team performance, and customer satisfaction. This crisis costs the overall U.S. economy as much as $350 billion every year. That boils down to at least $2,246 per zombie employee.5 As a leadership architect, you're going to need a range of tools to combat this energy drain. The following sections explore nine techniques to help you build an energized culture.
Lead by Example
If you want the people around you to be energized, you need to be energized. People pick up on the energetic cues of those around them, and they pay special attention to the energy of their leaders. If you're positive, people pick up positivity. If you're stressed out, you'll infect your team with anxiety.
As someone who leads groups of 10 to 2,000 people multiple times a week, I can testify to the importance of self-care. I've made showing up energized, focused, and positive a habit. My rituals around this include planning my travel schedule to get at least 8 hours of sleep a night; eating lean, healthy whole foods; and exercising daily.
When you show up to work, what behaviors do you model? How much gas do you have in your tank? What things do you do on a regular basis to renew and recharge? Do you get enough sleep? How's your nutrition? How often do you engage in physical activity? How often do you do things that you're passionate about? Find and cultivate the habits that will fuel you.
Use the 90-minute Rule
Have you ever noticed you hit an energy breaking point during long meetings and/or conference calls? Symptoms of this include your body getting fidgety, loss of focus, and becoming cranky. This breaking point usually happens at about 90 minutes. Proceed past this mark at your own peril. On the far side of this threshold, information processing and decision-making quickly degrades in quality.
These signposts are your body's way of telling you that your physical systems need to renew and recharge. If you want to avoid this energy collapse, stop and take a break at least every 90 minutes. “Pushing on through” does more harm than good. Although it might seem counterintuitive, you (and your team) will end up getting better work done in less time if you include breaks.
Stop Unnecessary Interruptions
When you ask someone, “Hey, do you have just a second?,” that “one second” comes with a tremendous cost. First off, there's the time of the interruption itself—which is never just a second. Then, there's the time it takes to get back to the point they were before the interruption. Research has shown that the average time it takes to refocus is 23 minutes and 15 seconds.6 Basex, an economy research firm, reports that interruptions at work consume an average of 2.1 hours per day per employee.7 Based on that lost time, the subsequent lost productivity costs the U.S. economy $588 billion dollars per year.8
If you work in an interrupting culture, you're not alone. A recent study shares a startling finding: 71% of people report frequent interruptions when they're working.9 Beyond the time loss, there's the burnout factor. Workers who are frequently interrupted reported 9% higher exhaustion rates.10
When someone's in your face asking if you have a second, it's hard to say no. It's especially hard to say no when that person is your boss. If you want to remedy the ills of interruptions, stop being part of the problem.
Next, help the rest of your team minimize interruptions. Encourage people to turn off auto-notifications. Set norms around what “prompt” response times are. Agree to call someone's mobile only in cases of true urgency.
You can also create stretches of dedicated time so people can get to the important work that demands deeper thinking. Set up office hours for questions. Create no-email Friday afternoons, or no-meeting Tuesday mornings. Put up yellow “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” tape around your space so people know to leave you alone. Your ability to help people protect their time and focus is as boundless as your imagination.
Direct Less and Facilitate More
As a rule, adults don't like to be told how they should do something. They prefer being self-directed. Collaborative leaders find ways to get people involved.
As you plan your meetings, town halls, one-on-ones, ask yourself, “How can I structure these so my team members are more involved and engaged?” Look for opportunities that offer minimum instruction and maximum autonomy. Draw on the expertise of those you lead. They have years of experience and a rich bank of knowledge. You just need to ask them to share it.
There's no need to shout out that you're the team leader—everyone knows that already. Being overly directive when you don't need to be doesn't enhance your leadership aura—it ticks people off. If you want to get more done with less effort, start thinking and acting like a facilitator.
Create Variety
Do you have a regularly scheduled meeting that should win the award for “most dull meeting ever”? Anything, no matter what it is, if unchanged, gets stale over time. Remember this simple rule: Boring = Bad. Energized = Good.
One of the key drivers of energy is fascination. Novelty, by its nature, takes people by surprise. Find ways to spice up your experience with seeking and applying the new. This takes some planning and creativity.
For example, what if you were to start each meeting by asking each team member a thought-provoking question? Or watching a relevant TED Talk and discussing it? Mix it up. Once you get into the flow of variety, there's no limit to your creativity.
Include Humor
When it comes to increasing energy, laughter may indeed be the best medicine. Studies have shown that employee humor is associated with enhanced work performance, satisfaction, work group cohesion, health, and coping effectiveness, as well as decreased burnout, stress, and work withdrawal.11
Humor is a double-edged sword. Although the benefits are clear, if used incorrectly, it creates hurt feelings, animosity, and divisiveness. As a leader, your best rule of thumb regarding humor is to be self-deprecating. You'll never run the risk of hurting someone else's feelings if you make fun of yourself. You'll also never run short on content for your material.
Tell Stories
When the first groups of people gathered together in caves and around fires, they told stories. This was no accident: stories are one of the most powerful forms of human communication. Good stories draw you in. They have interesting characters. They take you on a journey, involve a challenge or conflict, and bring illumination in their resolution. Skilled storytellers know how to craft their stories to leave their listeners with a powerful message.
Not only do great stories make you think but also, more importantly, they make you feel. When you hear a good story, you don't just listen. You see the images. Mirror neurons in your brain are activated, and you identify with the characters in the story. You experience the action as though it's happening to you. This multisensory combination makes stories vivid in a way that a series of data points and graphs just can't do.
The visceral effect that stories have brings added benefits. Not only are you held rapt as it's being told, you'll remember the story long afterward. In a world of information overload, messages can drown easily in a sea of data. Stories are your best hope to get your point of view across. They help others hear your signal amid the noise.
Get People Moving
In physics, energy is defined as the capacity to do work. Similarly, if the people you lead are more energized, they can perform better. Unfortunately, in this age of doing more with less, fatigue has become the norm rather than the exception.
A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that 38% of American workers surveyed experienced “low levels of energy, poor sleep or a feeling of fatigue” during their past two weeks at work.
Not only do they feel worse, they perform worse. The study found that total lost productive time averaged 5.6 hours per week for workers with fatigue, compared to 3.3 hours for their counterparts without fatigue. In addition, tired employees are less able to concentrate, have more frequent health problems, and are more likely to have a job-related safety incident.12
Although it may seem counterintuitive, one of the best ways to increase energy is by using energy, specifically through low to moderate physical activity. Researchers at the University of Georgia found that when a group of sedentary people were exposed to low-intensity aerobic exercise for 20 minutes three times a week for six weeks, their fatigue levels dropped by 65% and their energy levels rose by 20%.13
To optimize collaboration, design an environment that involves movement. There are lots of ways to do this:
- Have a Stand-Up Meeting: you'll be amazed how focused and succinct people will become.
- Start a meeting with a few minutes of gentle stretching.
- If you're meeting with just one or two other people, consider turning the conversation into a walking meeting (grab a notepad to record ideas).
- Walk to colleagues' offices rather than using a phone or email.
- Encourage a culture of standing up periodically.
- Use the stairs instead of the elevator.
Remember, adults aren't just thinking machines. They have bodies attached to their cerebellums. They can only absorb so much while sitting still. Find ways to keep your team moving to keep a high level of focus.
Appreciate
If you think appreciation is crucial in the workplace, you're right: 66% of employees say they would “likely leave their job if they didn't feel appreciated.” This is up significantly from 51% of employees who felt this way in 2012.14 The research firm OC Tanner has found that lack of appreciation is the number-one reason people leave jobs (78%).15
Appreciation is key to boosting engaged collaboration. However, too many leaders don't take the time or make the effort to acknowledge good work that gets done on a regular basis. As soon as one goal is achieved, they focus on the next goal. This drains the team of morale and energy, leaving them feeling taken for granted.
You don't have to be the highest-ranking executive in charge to foster a culture of appreciation. All you need to do is take action. Consider the case of Laila, who managed a major engagement with one of her firm's largest clients. The size and scope were massive—30 live events run in 10 cities for 2,000 people, delivered in just over a month. Each event had custom components that had to be tailor-managed. The client continued to make revisions right through the first week of deployment, and in order to keep the planes flying smoothly, Laila put in 70-hour workweeks.
The project ran without a single major problem. The client and their 2,000 people were thrilled. When the project ended, Laila hoped that the partners in her firm would stop and celebrate the work done by the 30-person team who pulled it off. Although Laila had influence with the team, she had zero authority. None of these 30 people reported to her. Which senior person would stop and recognize their accomplishment?
Laila quickly realized (based on past experience) that no one was going to fill the vacuum. So she sent out an email to the entire team:
Laila's email started a “reply-all love-fest” that everyone got involved in. The positive energy was infectious. One member of the team was so inspired by Laila that he wrote an email to the entire firm, providing context and details so the larger company could also join in the celebration. In that email, he singled out Laila for her superb leadership and going above and beyond the call of duty.
Afterward, Laila told me:
I could get upset about the fact that our team wasn't being recognized the way I wanted it to—or I could do something about it. This experience taught me that I have a lot more power than I realize.
MEETING THE PRIMARY NEEDS
Feeling safe to bring your whole self to work. Having energy to have that whole self be your best self. These primary needs seem so obvious. Yet, in many organizations, these needs are forgotten, neglected, or taken for granted. As a leader, you have the power to change the game. You now have plenty of design tools. You can reshape your environment and make sure these needs get met. Then, you can move on and find ways to address your employees' next set of needs: the performance needs.